Entrepreneurs are advised to develop a business plan written to communicate an objective, critical and unemotional view of how the business enterprise will function in order to achieve strategic goals. Business plan documentation contains details regarding not only the direct costs of producing the products or services, but indirect costs required to engineer, market, certify, service, and warehouse the enterprise. Projections regarding hiring and training costs for required personnel are estimated based on required interactions of personnel acting as specified by their position descriptions within the enterprise. All this information about the new enterprise is described in a brief, written document agreed to by the business partners. At this point, the newly formed enterprise architecture, as described in the resultant business plan, represents the whole enterprise. If the start-up is small and day-to-day decisions are made between a few partners working on new ideas, the business plan may be the first attempt at documenting the enterprise in text, charts and graphics. The process of writing the business plan may uncover regulations the partners had not yet considered, including how they propose to comply with industry standards, satisfy local and federal tax requirements, and manage the costs involved in attracting and maintaining customers, among others.
As an enterprise organization grows, the original, simple business plan outline no longer represents established and complex enterprise organizations as each major business function grows to a more complex structure. Changes to the mature enterprise are needed to reflect changes in industry laws and regulations as well as strategic decisions that reshape the future of the organization. Strategic managers of a complex enterprise may charter their staff or consultants to research and write changes to the organization. When accepted, management signifies their approval of departmental change documents in writing. It is this shared, documented and approved strategic perspective that now provides the current holistic view of the complex organization to personnel tasked with implementing change. Often the enterprise becomes so complex, even experienced workers have difficulty describing all the required details that take place between the various systems when they write system requirements for technology and may not understand or know about important cross-functional collaborations. Stove-piped technology solutions are the result of technology planning focused on the needs of a singular enterprise system and its department management structure. To ensure that strategic decisions are reasonable, the technology planning process and deliverable requirements need to be driven and guided by the holistic view of the business enterprise. Even though the unwritten culture of the organization is important, it is the written documentation that conveys the minimum critical specifications of the enterprise. Written documentation signifies what enterprise resources are necessary to carry out the required changes, including those of cross-functional departments, to produce its products and services. In some cases, these documented actions are not only authorized but mandated by law and may carry significant penalties if not followed as written.